06 - Vengeful by Robert J. Crane Page A

want hear about, liaisons he’d had in places she’d never even heard of. The man was a serial cheater, that was no doubt, and it was taking all her restraint not to just slap him out of the verbal diarrhea state he’d fallen into. By now he was just quivering and looked like he needed a smoke to calm his nerves.
    “Well, check on it, will you?” Ma asked, rolling her eyes. “We’re in the middle of having a conversation here.”
    “Yeah, all right,” Junior said, clearly not happy about it. He strolled off with his wide-frame self toward the front of the house.
    “Now, Eric,” Ma said, leaning a little closer to Simmons, “here’s what I want to know. It seems to me you don’t really have a lot of loyalty to Cassidy over there.” She waved her hand vaguely at the tank.
    “No, no,” Simmons said, shaking his head. “No, I love her—”
    “Eric,” Ma said, “you done slept with about eighty women by your own admission, and most of ’em since you got together with Cassidy.” She exchanged a look with Denise, who seemed to be enjoying this all immensely. “I get that you like to make girls quake, but … let’s just be honest. You’re using her.”
    Simmons’s mouth moved without words coming out, open and closed like a fish out of water. “No, I … it’s not like that …”
    “It’s exactly like that,” Ma said, doing her best Dr. Phil impersonation. “It’s a problem of competing desires. See, Cassidy wants a faithful man, and you want to get your little dangle wet with every woman you’ve ever met.”
    Simmons furtively swept his gaze to Denise. “Not every woman.”
    Ma was about to slap the shit out of that boy when Junior came busting back into the room, hightailing like his rectum had just been lit like a fuse. “Sienna Nealon’s coming up the driveway in one of those agency cars!” His eyes were wide and he didn’t have that air of joking about him. “Got a bunch of her friends with her!”
    “We’ll kill her right now,” Denise said, standing up abruptly. “Let’s just do this—”
    “No.” Ma cut her off. She had more than a shiver of fear. “Cassidy didn’t even see this coming, which means Nealon’s tumbled to her little game.” She looked at Simmons. “Your girlfriend’s all played out. We’re about to get caught in a bear trap, and she either didn’t see it coming or she wanted to see us step in it.”
    Simmons was about two steps from panic. Clearly he hadn’t seen it coming, either. “Wha … what do we do?”
    Ma was a step ahead of him. She turned back to Junior, keeping her calm. “You said she’s got her friends with her?”
    Junior nodded. “Yeah, but …”
    “All right,” Ma said with a nod. “Here’s what we’re gonna do …”

22.

    Sienna
    Someone threw a car at our SUV and it hit head on, a collision that deployed the airbags and sent all of us smashing forward. I saw the movement before it happened, but I didn’t get a look at who did it, hiding behind the car before they threw it. I also didn’t manage to get out the door in time to stop it because I got tangled in my seatbelt and only managed to get halfway out the door before it hit. I smashed into the ground and was lucky in that the car didn’t land on me, because that would have probably been at least as uncomfortable as a meteor on my shoulders. Really, when it comes to pain, your nerve endings can only register crushing pressure up to a certain point, and I doubt they differentiated between one ton of car and twenty tons of rock.
    I lay there bleeding in the dirt for only a second, then sat up like the Undertaker. “Okay,” I said, “someone’s going to pay for that.” I got up and looked into the SUV, where my little team was stirring. “Everyone okay?”
    “Broke my glasses,” Jamal said.
    “Broke my asses,” Augustus said, pushing his way out the door on his side.
    “Feel like molasses,” Scott said, continuing the rhyme pretty ineffectually as he pushed